Price above Rubies, A (United States, 1998)

A movie review by James Berardinelli

A Price Above Rubies is writer/director Boaz Yakin's follow-up to his highly-regarded,
tautly-paced 1994 picture, Fresh. Sadly, little of the
energy and intelligence of the earlier film is evident in this, an overwrought melodrama populated
by stereotypes and featuring an improbable storyline that relies upon a string of coincidences.
Ostensibly, A Price Above Rubies details the struggle of one woman to throw off the
shackles of a conservative society, but the manner in which Yakin approaches this theme is
preachy, pedantic, and predictable.

The woman is Sonia (Renee Zellweger) and the society is New York City's Hasidic Jewish
community. She is a good woman married to Mendel (Glenn Fitzgerald), a highly-respected
scholar. From the beginning, Sonia is aware that there is something missing from her matrimonial
union. Everything that she finds erotic, he finds indecent. To him, sex is exclusively for
procreation, not for quenching "the fire" that burns inside of his wife. Any observer can see than
Sonia is profoundly unhappy, but only her brother-in-law, Sender (Christopher Eccleston), offers a
solution.

In addition to giving Sonia work procuring jewelry for his underground business, Sender enters
into a sexual relationship with her (that, apparently, is the price she pays for getting the job). As
unwanted as she finds his rough advances, Sonia is liberated through this act of unfaithfulness.
Sender rationalizes his actions by saying that, while everyone sins, "it's the quality of our sins
which sets us apart." He obviously considers his violations to be somewhere in the upper echelon.
At any rate, as a result of the new facets of life shown to her by Sender, Sonia begins to yearn for
the kind of freedom that she cannot find within the Hasidic community. Yet she realizes that if she
attempts to leave Mendel, she will lose everything. Meanwhile, she finds herself battling an
attraction to a promising young jewelry maker (Allen Payne), which further complicates her
situation. To help her with her difficult decisions, Sonia receives advice from two unusual agents:
a prophetic bag lady (Kathleen Chalfant) and the ghost of her brother (Shelton Dane), who died as
a child.

I needn't say which path Sonia chooses, because, like almost everything else in this movie, it's
easily guessed. One of the most disappointing aspects of A Price Above Rubies is its lack
of originality - right down to the too-pat conclusion. The premise has a great deal of potential,
little of which is realized. Instead of fashioning a gallery of interesting, multi-dimensional
characters around Sonia, Yakin is content to plunder a bag of types. Most of the individuals fall
into the traditional, morally-upright, inflexible mold of those who stifle creativity in the name of
conformity. With the exceptions of Sonia, the old Rebbe (John Randolph), and his wife (Kim
Hunter), no one within the community exhibits even the slightest trace of humanity.

That's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however. One of the most potentially fascinating
elements of A Price Above Rubies is the opportunity it affords for an exploration of the
Hasidic society. What Yakin gives us, however, is disappointingly superficial, and rivals the
banality offered by Sidney Lumet in A Stranger Among Us, a horribly misguided mystery
about a murder investigation in the Hasidic community. Any film that attempts to delve beneath
the surface of a closed society will face an inevitable likening to Peter Weir's Witness,
which painted the Amish with a rich, varied brush. A Price Above Rubies makes the not-
dissimilar Hasidic people look cartoonish by comparison.

Yakin's casting choices are also questionable. While it's easy enough to accept Christopher Eccleston (the title character in 1996's Jude) as
a Hasidic bad boy and Julianna Margulies as a defender of the community, those two are only
supporting players; the problems are with the leads. Glenn Fitzgerald is flat and
unconvincing as Mendel. There's no passion or power in this performance; it's a dull, lifeless
rendering of a man who is supposed to be deeply devout. I'm not suggesting that Fitzgerald should
have gone down the route taken by Robert Duvall in The
Apostle, but a little more energy might have made Mendel seem less like a writer's
construct and more like an individual.

The flaw in Renee Zellweger's performance is harder to define. She is a talented actress who has
shown range in her past roles (such as Jerry Maguire
and The Whole Wide World), but she is miscast
as Sonia. Despite imbuing her character with spirit and emotion, there's something fundamentally
"off" in her attempts to portray a Hasidic woman. Regardless of how hard she tries, she doesn't fit
the part. There are numerous instances when Zellweger's intonations and accent are all wrong. It's
the little things that are problematic.

A Price Above Rubies isn't a complete disaster. Despite its obvious faults, the melodrama
is never boring. My reservations about Zellweger's performance don't alter the fact that Sonia is an
appealing protagonist, and it's not hard to identify with her struggles. Unlike many of the other
characters in the film, she is well-developed, although certain facets of her personality are built
through cliches. So, although A Price Above Rubies can be described as "watchable," it
stands as a mediocre exploration of one woman's attempts to express her individuality in a closed
society.